Mouse Girl? Very funny. Was he ever going to let the whole book thing drop? It wasn’t anything big. It wasn’t exactly a best seller or a Caldecott award winner. She might have been more irritated if she didn’t feel badly about faking a hurt ankle. “I’m sorry. And I won’t hold you to the bet. In fact, I never really agreed to it in the first place.” More of Gage’s help was probably the last thing on earth that she needed, anyway. A few more people were voluntarily dunking themselves back into the swimming hole, and she swam downstream to get out of their way.
“Nope. I am a man of my word. Shall I rescue you from the water now? Arrange for transport to the bridge? Fan you dry with a pine bough?”
“Oh, you’re funny.”
“So I’ve been told.” Down he went again. Anticipating being dunked made her heart race. And where was Leah, anyway? Meg spotted her, put her head down, and swam upstream with all her might. When she was getting close she realized Leah and Joshua were playing their own game, something that was half about splashing each other and half about cuddling. Meg didn’t want to interrupt that. She spotted Cadence and some other young women up above on the ledge. There were several young men below her trying to get her to jump, but not trying very hard because the view was fine. Her aunts and uncles were finding perches on the edges to dry in the sunshine and watch the silliness below.
She knew many of the people here but not as well as Joshua knew them. He had lived here full time until moving to Texas for graduate school. During her visits she had spent so many hours in this swimming hole she thought the turquoise water must run through her veins. It seemed a lot colder than she remembered, though. It was the first week in June, and the waters were still high and icy from the snowmelt.
If she had a wedding, it couldn’t be full of high school friends, she thought. She had gone to school so many places that it taxed her memory to remember them all. Those friendships hadn’t lasted.
Gage popped up nearby and shook the water out of his hair directly into her face. “Are you lost?” he asked with a smile. “Actually, you look cold. Your lips are kind of blue. You can pull off the Goth look better than I would’ve thought.”
Ha! But he was right; instead of getting used to the cold she just seemed to be getting colder. “Where is that transportation you were going to arrange?”
“Oh, I’ve got that covered. Hold on right here.” He gestured to the water, and it seemed to her—could it be?—that he was pointing to his rear end.
She blinked. “Whatever you mean, I think not.”
He looked embarrassed. “I didn’t mean… I wouldn’t ask… I meant my belt. In the back. Stop laughing at me.”
She couldn’t help it. She thought he might actually be blushing. Shivering, she swam one stroke closer and reached for his belt. “Why am I doing this again?”
“Transportation. Hold on,” he said. He went a little out of the water, dove down, and dunked her again. But for some reason she didn’t let go, and when she surfaced she was racing across the water. Gage wasn’t just a good swimmer, he was faster than anyone she could ever remember swimming with. Startled, and laughing, Meg held on and tried to stay to the side, out of the way of his legs. She flew across the swimming hole. She hoped dragging her this way wouldn’t make his belt slide off.
The water was shallow near the bridge, and she let go and stood up. She felt heavy, messy, and very cold. Gage stood up too, looking very fine in his wet shirt, wet jeans, and ruined cowboy boots. He shook his head and sprayed her again. “Shall I carry you to the top?”
“Absolutely not,” she said with a laugh. “So I take it you’ve done a little swimming before?”
He nodded. “I competed in college. And if you don’t mind, I think I’m going to get a little more swimming in before I get out for good.” He reached down, pulled off a boot, then upended it. Water poured out, and it was so comical Meg couldn’t help but laugh out loud. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“I can tell.” He did the same to the other boot.
“I’ll put those in the sun for you,” she said, reaching for the boots. “I’m not sure it’s going to do much good, though.”
Gage waded a couple of steps deeper and dove out into the water. He disappeared beneath the surface. She waited for a minute to see if he would surface, wondering if he might in fact have gills. But her shivering was getting worse, so she climbed the grassy slope up into the mountain sunshine.
It was so beautiful. There was hardly a breath of wind, and the sun was warm and high even this late in the afternoon. Blue lupines and bunches of showy, golden arrowleaf balsamroot blanketed the valley. The air smelled faintly of pine and the rocky, clean scent of rushing water. She often felt an ache at moments like this, knowing that the river-bottom land once belonged to her family but didn’t anymore. Now it was a jumble of water rights, mining claims, grazing leases, public lands, and private inholdings owned mostly by a land company out of Pennsylvania. Its future was uncertain.
She doubted anything could make Joshua let go of the cabin and its 160 acres, though. Her many cousins would soon start families of their own. Joshua and Leah were welcoming, but they couldn’t be expected to keep letting everyone come here whenever they liked. There were just too many Parks around, now.
It was Joshua’s cabin, and that was just as well, because if her parents had inherited it they would have sold it in an instant to fund their latest mission. They would always have an empty bank account and a new mailing address.
Meg wondered what legacy she would leave to her children, and whether she would ever have any kids. What sort of husband would she want, and who would want her at the same time? The whole thing seemed so unlikely that she sighed and chased the thought from her mind.
Leah rose up out of the creek bed nearby, looking frozen to the bone. “That was crazy,” she said. “Y’all are nuts.”
“You won.”
“Sort of. Oh, and you with the hurt ankle! I about fell over. When Gage went in the water, it was all I could do not to let go of the rope, I was laughing so hard. Good gracious, are those his boots?”
“Yep. I need to set them out to dry.” Meg and Leah wandered near the top of the swimming hole and found a grassy, warm place to sit. Leah shook out her hair and tilted her face to the sun. “I saw you swimming with him. It looked like you were riding a dolphin,” she teased.
“He was just being my valet. He bet me that he wouldn’t end up in the water, and since he lost, he said he’s going to be my valet all day.”
Leah shook her head, eyes closed. “He’s certainly a charmer.” Then she leaned forward and looked into the swimming hole.
Meg did the same, and they could see Gage down below, playing keep away with a woman’s towel. Most of the guys were in on it, but even when the towel changed hands there was a school of women swimming around Gage.
There was something in Leah’s tone that was nagging at her. “I don’t know about charming. He seems nice, but not my type. Why, is there something I should know about him?” Gage ducked below the surface, and a few of the girls started to splash and squeal as they tried to get away from him.
“I don’t think so,” Leah said. “I’ve never seen him be anything but polite, Meg. It’s just that he’s got a checkered past, and I knew him back then. He was, well, a friend of a friend. But Joshua thinks the world of him. Being Josh’s roommate changed a lot of things for him.”
That wasn’t necessarily a compliment. Joshua found friends everywhere, but they weren’t all the kind of person Meg would want to date. Gage had the towel again, and it was causing quite a commotion in the swimming hole.
Leah looked deep in thought. “I think he’s a good friend, but I haven’t thought about whether he’d be a good boyfriend now. A lot has changed in his life, Meg, but he and I are not close enough to discuss those things. If you ever did find him charming, I think it would be a good thing to ask him outright what kind of boyfriend he would be. In fact, it’s a good question for any man y
ou might want to date.”
Meg laughed. “Leah, you sound just like Catherine.”
“Really?” Leah’s eyes were bright.
“Yes, really. You two have a lot in common. You’re both easy to talk to.” She thought about the cabin, breakfast, the wedding, and more. “You’re both generous people, too.”
Leah looked flattered. “Catherine is very generous. But you know that, spending so much time with her. Did you know she talks about you like you’re her daughter? And for that matter, Josh talks about you like a sister.”
Meg let that soak in like the sunlight, and it felt just as warm. “They always made me feel at home.”
“I thought you liked being on the move. You do live out of a camper most of the time.”
For some reason, Leah’s words troubled her. “I don’t have much choice. I go wherever the jobs are. Next week it’s a community center in a small town north of here. They want a ‘Say No to Drugs’ mural in the gym. I’m supposed to do part of it and help the kids do the rest.”
“I know you also do a lot of clipart for the Internet, and you can do that just about anywhere. It’s too bad there isn’t something else you could do so you wouldn’t have to be on the move all the time.”
Something like write? Meg wanted that. She wanted it so badly that every time she sat down to work on another storybook she felt paralyzed with fear. How much work could a muralist get? She was pretty sure she’d broken a record, at least in the state. But no one considered her bright, whimsical designs high art. The end of her current lifestyle was looming, though, lurking in the rusted Jeep hitch, the leaky water tank of her camper, and the calls that weren’t coming as fast as they once had. She was three years from thirty with an associate’s degree and hardly any skills that could get her a real job.
The worry and uncertainty of her parents’ life was exactly what she had wanted to avoid. She had worked nearly every day for the last decade, and yet here she was… headed for the same place. And without the good reasons her parents always had.
She tilted her face toward the light. She needed a little more sunshine. “Can you keep a secret?”
“Not from Joshua.”
That made Meg smile. “I’m glad he found you, Leah. No, I wouldn’t expect you to keep it from him, but I hope you’ll give me a chance to tell him myself sometime in the next few months.”
“Well, if it isn’t something like a serious illness or an upcoming marriage, I suppose I can hold off telling him for a little bit.”
“It’s not. It’s stupid, really. I never told anyone, but I wrote and illustrated a children’s book. It was kind of a fluke. I made a booklet to go with one of my murals at a school, and a teacher there pulled some strings with an agent friend of hers. The next thing I knew it was published. Sales were slow at first, and I didn’t expect anything different, but now for some reason they’re picking up. The publisher wants to do another book and make it a big media blitz.”
Leah looked happy and, surprisingly, not shocked. “That’s wonderful, Meg! Why on earth would you want to keep that secret?”
Meg tried to put it in words, but each time she tried it got stuck in her throat and she didn’t want to have to spit it out.
“You’re worried it’s all going to fall apart, aren’t you?” Leah said.
Meg nodded with relief. “That’s a big part of it.”
“Never mind that. Josh is going to be so happy for you. And Catherine. Except she’s going to kill you for not telling her.”
“Don’t I know it.”
Right on cue, Joshua climbed out onto the grassy shore and called out, “Are you two talking about me?”
Josh hugged Leah like he hadn’t seen her in hours. “I’m starving,” he said. “It must be time to barbecue. Uh-oh, are those Gage’s boots?”
There was a photo session with the drenched and dirty crew back at the parking lot. Meg tried to bury herself in the middle of the crowd. Gage stood behind her, his soggy boots back on. He and Josh’s brother, Caleb, put the groom up on their shoulders, and Josh managed to stay up there just long enough for a few pictures before he crashed down into the waiting arms of his bride and wedding guests.
It was an even tighter fit in the Monster because many of the guests left their cars behind to make room for the wedding. Meg kept her messenger bag tucked into her lap and sat near the edge of the vehicle as it started back up toward the cabin.
The dinner barbecue was supposed to be the responsibility of the men of the wedding party, Joshua, Gage, and Caleb. When she overheard Leah say she wanted to take an hour off for a nap, Meg saw her chance to have a few moments to herself and asked Josh to drop her off at the old logging road on the way. When he stopped, she slipped off the side, said a quick good-bye to Leah, and then backed away.
Gage started to stand up as if he were going to follow her. He was taking this valet thing far too seriously, she realized. She waved, the Monster lurched, and Gage sat back down hard. She turned and walked down the grassy roadway as other cars passed by behind her. It felt like she had her own private retreat, and she relished this moment of rest. Sure, she could use a shower, but it could wait a few minutes for her to drink a glass of water and maybe lie down for a bit.
She woke up feeling light-headed, disoriented, and anxious. How long had she been asleep? Meg checked her watch. She hoped she hadn’t missed out on any maid of honor duties. Her dream was still buzzing around in her head, something about the stream and a flash flood, and Gage swimming hard. He’d turned into a dolphin, hadn’t he, and stranded her in the middle of the ocean? Meg shook her head. Weird, very weird. Here she’d finally gotten away from him and he had found a way to get into her dreams.
She sat on the edge of the bed. Her sketchbook was still on the table, open to a blank page. The publisher wanted a proposal by the end of next week, and Whitehall School District wanted her to come for an interview on Monday. If she took that job, they wanted the mural done the second week of school, along with presentations to the school assembly.
And that conflicted with the book signing her publisher wanted her to do that week. The thought of a book signing filled her with dread. There would be adults there—even worse, there would be parents there, scrutinizing her work. Would they sense God’s presence in her story? Would they be offended, one way or another? Would there be enough colors of fur among the animals? Would they take offense to a bad word like “bottom”? Ugh. Talking to kids was fun. Talking to adults was a minefield.
She hooked the hose to the faucet, opened the window, and fed the hose through. It only took a moment to put the shower head on it and hang the shower tent on the outside of the camper, since she had installed a folding hook. She did a careful check of the woods: no voices or signs of movement, as she expected.
Back inside the camper, she slipped out of her damp clothes, put on a towel and a pair of flip-flops, and grabbed her shampoo. There was so much privacy in the woods here she didn’t feel the need to keep her bathing suit on. The very last thing was to turn on the hot and cold water to just the right combination. She set the faucet and then hurried outside so she didn’t waste any precious water.
She hung the towel on its own special hook and ducked in under the drizzle of water—yikes! Still cold! She backed off and shampooed her hair until the water warmed up. The shampoo made a fine soap, too, and in a flash the mud and grass from the creek, and possibly the Monster’s exhaust fumes, were gone. She rinsed with a sigh. It felt so good.
She grabbed her towel, wrapped herself in it, and dashed out of the shower stall to turn off the water. She only made it three steps before she heard a gasp and looked up to see Gage standing in front of her holding something big and green. She screamed.
He looked absolutely shocked. Her mind was in a whirl. She’d run out of water if she didn’t turn it off soon, and she wasn’t entirely sure what her crumpled towel was covering. Worse, rearranging it could be perilous. She had to get to the door on the other side of
the camper, but she couldn’t turn her back because she was sure her rear towel coverage was not sufficient. How could she back over the hitch without showing too much? And was that a car motor she heard behind her?
Gage looked down. “I actually wanted to give you—”
Frustrated and embarrassed, she cut him off with a loud, “Go!” She backed around the corner, around the hitch, and through the door, half expecting him to come after her. He started to say something else, but she was so flustered she added, “Just go away!” for extra protection. In a second the door was closed and latched, the water was off, and Meg stood dripping on the mud she’d tracked in. She usually left her flip-flops outside. She also usually wasn’t on a postshower run from tall Texans.
She couldn’t hear him. She waited for a knock on the door, but it didn’t come. She was afraid to look out the window at first, but finally she did and she saw no sign of him. Gage was gone. She breathed a sigh of relief.
What on earth was he up to? Could he have made an honest mistake? Well, there was nothing honest about sneaking up on a girl in the shower. She wondered briefly about her conversation with Leah. Just exactly what checkered past did Gage have? She shook her head. It was none of her business, not that Leah would tell her, anyway. More importantly, she didn’t care. He had left, she was fine, and sometime after the wedding he would be flying back to Texas. She had never seen him before, so she was pretty certain she’d never have to see him again.
Meg put on “comfort clothes”: her favorite jeans, her favorite cute-but-soft shirt, and her favorite boots. Ugh, Gage’s boots. Would they have survived if she hadn’t feigned an injury? That wasn’t fair at all. She regretted doing it. And at the same time, she didn’t. She turned on the camper’s master switch just long enough to use the travel dryer to dry her hair a little, and then she put on a little makeup. Not too much, just a little went a long way with her fair skin and gray eyes. Bright colors—colors like Kelly green—made her look pale or sick. Meg laughed out loud and shook her head. Other than the dress, she was beginning to look forward to being Leah’s maid of honor.
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